Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has commissioned Michael Schwab, one of America’s most recognized graphic artists, to create exclusive artwork for the 2011 edition of the network’s TCM Classic Film Festival, which takes place April 28 – May 1 in Hollywood. The official poster and other designs created by Schwab will be used throughout the festival and in all promotional materials, including festival merchandise.

Schwab has created several film genre-based images for the TCM Classic Film Festival. You can see romance, musicals, dramas and westerns. He also created an image to highlight the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the centerpiece venue for the festival. Schwab will be on-hand during the TCM Classic Film Festival to sign the official festival poster for festival passholders. His work can also be seen at Turner Classic Movie official site.

Discussing the project, Schwab says, “Movies have always played a starring role in my life and in my work. As a kid, I remember stealing away to my small town theater and getting lost in the great classics. Those iconic images of American film have, in many ways, influenced my own artistic style. It’s a style that is defined, much like these classic movies, by bold, dramatic and memorable graphic images. It’s an honor to have been chosen by TCM to create these exciting and historic portraits.”

The Criterion Collection is one of the biggest names in classic film out there, so it’s definitely worthwhile to mention most anything they do.

They went out to the All Tomorrow’s Parties combination music and film festival, and took along twenty two of their best titles to show. And as such, they also commissioned the picture you see below, a kind of massive superposter created by several comic book artists showing off new versions of box art in one handy package.

While the thought of twenty two Criterion films in one place is amazing for most any film buff, the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival also boasted a host of music acts including Sonic Youth and Iggy and the Stooges.

Monticello rocked last weekend, and with that poster, well, the whole thing is complete.

I’m not usually one for classic film.  Even when they’re remastered and such, the sound still comes through poorly, the film itself often looks grainy and gritty, the special effects are a joke by even today’s standards, and the dialogue has this weird tendency to be pompous and overblown.

So when I sat down to watch Ulysses, now remastered from Lions Gate, I found a lot of the problems I expected.  But I also found some surprisingly great things here.

Ulysses is based on the Homer poem The Odyssey, itself about the legendary journey of Ulysses as he heads back to Ithaca following the sack of Troy.  On his long, LONG, way back, he’ll face off against witches, a cyclops, and plenty more, as he tries to get home before his wife remarries…against her will

And yes, all the problems I expected were here.  Lots of pops and hisses from the audio track, as though I were listening to an old record instead of digital playback.  Washed out colors, poorly synced dialogue tracks, the works.  Everything I expected to be wrong here was.

And yet, I also got a deep and masterful epic based on some of the greatest literature ever placed on the earth.  Sometimes, it’s true, that great gifts can come in horrible wrappings…this is one of those times.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives it a six out of ten–a nine out of ten for plot, and a three out of ten for presentation.  A great story with so many technical problems as to be badly obscured, Ulysses was a good watch, once you got past the sheer number of troubles in the playback.